Wonder

I look at this poem and do not believe I had a hand in creating it some years ago.
Actually, it was not even yet a year past, but it seems to me a fortune of years.

Today we are so pressed on all sides, it does me especially well to remember the powers that spring from the Holy and its sublime awesome which encompasses us.

When lilies of the field are pressed
between the good book's pages,
in sweet Lord Jesus' raiment dressed,
their seed endure for ages!

refrain  
God's seed endures forever, blown on the wind of grace;  
it will always bloom again and grow to His embrace.



The wheat upon the open plain,
stretch forth their heads to pray;
costume themselves in diamond rain,
and their winnow fan array.  

refrain
God's seed endures forever, blown on the wind of grace;  
it will always bloom again and grow to His embrace.



Currents of the His saving waters,
sweep in the ebb and flow;
they bring a saving grace to me,
and to the flowers to grow.  

refrain
God's seed endures forever, blown on the wind of grace;
it will always bloom again and grow to His embrace.



See me at the harvest,
see me at the bee;
lay me up in in bundled straw,
yearning to be free!

And when the harvest's over,
and no more stalks to scythe,
yet buy some time with lemonade,
and we shall be alive!


--

note
I like the way it moves from the sublime to the homey refreshment of lemonade. We go up, and we come down.

veille du nouvel an

ouvrir mes bras la nuit dernière,
sang mouillé, anonyme;
nous buvons ,
nous hurlons
à la lune et aux étoiles -
et coups de feu partout.
bienvenue à mon intérieur !


--

open my arms last night,
blood wet, anonymous;
we drink,
we howl
at the moon at stars -
gunshots everywhere.
welcome to my inside!

Christmas Flooding!

The front door is a gentle rain to its friends,
readily fills the dining room reserve,
while busy cooks swell aromatic rivers;
mill dams of desires!

--

Citizens United

Modern day Terminator!
Hawking fears A.I.
The Imperial Memorial of 1958 -
when Sarah Connor was born -
spoke of the need for virtue confronted
by non-humans riding motorcycles...
and nude-crashing into biker bars!
and the right to voice your opinion
in a letter with a 3 cent stamp!
Ha! 
3 cents ignores the human costs involved;
Ha!
the corporate voice:
a CONELRAD siren;
pierces the silent holy night,
and grabs and pulls at
Christina's human legs!
desperate for home!

北方之旅

北方之旅，

看新生儿;

不久，

很快

返回南方。

--
apologies for poor Chinese poetry....

northern journey,
see newborn baby;
very soon,
very quick
return south.

My Favorite

My favorite poem.
I tear up a little when I read it.

(I have used the Anglo-Saxon word trūw in the last stanza in order to try and capture the many meanings of "true", which range from "not logically false" to "firm and steadfast" to "aligning tires to run in a straight line". It should be pronounced as the modern "true", however.
The "Georgia" referred to is the Caucasian State of Georgia.)

when did you get home?
and did the ocean roar?

did you see your pals again
at the Georgian shore?

did you look into a store,
did you hold your child high?

and why was he a kid again,
and why was I a sigh?

i have already been there...
i shall not go again.
go and find your future
and sometimes i will send

an email of Christmas time,
Easter email too,
picnics, woods, and running twain
for we shall ne'er be trūw...

--

Saint Patrick

Saint Patrick's Day, 2014

Leaving you yet asleep,
I rise and travel far away,
into this our endless winter,
this our cold Saint Patrick’s day.

A rare swimmer, now I go
toward the northern wind to roam
around  great lake of oblivion,
and to recall the warmth of home.

Mortal billows and icy wind
will not imprison me,
for I shall gain a higher shore,
and soon return to thee!



--

Six Feet Under

I had wanted to write about the series Six Feet Under about two weeks ago, and the press of business stopped me from doing so.

I had never seen the series before, and I liked it.
Since it is winter, we watch episodic entertainments like Six Feet Under in an immersion form of viewing: we do not watch one episode a week, nor even merely two or three a week; we watch two or three consecutively on the same day, and we find comfort in them as the winds howl outside.

I watched Six Feet during the polar vortex, which started here January 6.
(Now we are watching Jewel In The Crown and will soon start Brideshead Revisited.)

There is a lot about the series I did not like; there were some things I found tedious and boring, but the cumulative effect was overwhelming and positive.

It dawned on me that this immersion method of at least 3 hours of viewing at a sitting is probably a lot like the ancient Greeks used to listen to the poetry of Homer as the bards recited the exploits of Achilles and the Achaeans and Odysseus and his crew: a long session, interrupted by food and drink, long enough to fall under the spell of the words of enchantment, and be taken into the realm of the characters that populate those tales.

The most effective forms of propaganda would be long hours spent in the realms and rituals of fantasy, are they not?
It makes me think of Leni Reifenstahl and the Nurnberg rallies she documented in The Triumph Of The Will.
The will has nothing to do with it, other than consciously entering the sacred lands, lands taboo and haram, because of the power therein.

We are transformed for good or for ill, depending as we choose our enchantments.
--

The Christmas Carol, Pre-Restoration Poets משׁ-משׁ

 The Twelve Days of Christmas Schematic

First, I write "mish-mosh" as משׁ-משׁ
That is my yiddish, my homage to Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Springer, and if someone does not like it, too bad. I never said I was a learned man. I can't even remember the name for the hyphen between words in Hebrew. Mappiq comes to mind, but I think that's a dot that doubles a consonant.

Mish-Mosh is "mixed up" or "mixed together", maybe an anagram, maybe a Mad-Libs of unrelated sentences and words.
It can be a soup or stew into which a cook throws everything but the kitchen sink.
It could also be pronounced "mosh-mish", and is a good example of its own meaning, sort of a self-referential expression.

For example, thus far, this post is a mish-mosh, and nobody knows what I am talking about.

OK.
Reading the Signs (http://readingthesigns.blogspot.com/) sent a comment along about Christmastide and mentioned the 12 drummers drumming of the carol "The Twelve Days Of Christmas".

This immediately reminded me of a year when Christmastide seemed a little too hum-drum and boring. Things were beginning to drag. I called myself Ishmael... quite a few times, mumbling at the bathroom mirror as I brushed my teeth, leading She-who-must-be-obeyed to begin to get references for neurologists.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time that the nephews should be arriving upon me doorstep.

At last my three nephews, Ayden, Austin, and Aloysius (pronounced a-LOY-shus for all you who are not Sons of Hibernia) blew into town on the wings of Borealis (the north wind) and over tea we discussed not the Christmas goose, but ways to "goose" the Christmas feast... as it were.

My Three Nephews

Later over other beverages we decided to take the plunge into the dark arts of combining Christmas carols and the poetry of the Pre-Restoration English poets.
It soon morphed into the inclusion of all English poets; no point in restricting it.
I started with sort of a Mad-Libs scenario: a poem of Byron wherein I would excise portions and ask about for a line from Ginsberg or Bukowski... or even Donald Gaines.... or Danielle Steele, not even restricting it to poetry.

Then it underwent a change, and we generated things like

"And therefore never send to know for whom the 12 drummers drum;
they drum for thee."

and this went on for the entire set of verses,

"And therefore never send to know for whom the 10 lords leap;
they leap for thee."
 [...]
"And therefore never send to know for whom the 8 maids milk;
they milk for thee."

all the way down to,

"And therefore never send to know for whom the partridge perches;
it perches for thee."

Since we happily included Post-Restoration poets, we could do things like

Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey;
And merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay!

There are few rules, and you make them up on the fly.
All that is needed is that there must be enough of the poem to allow the glögg befuddled and rum-spiked egg nog inebriated minds of even the densest dancing Fezziwig and Fan to easily place the poetry and carol.

Now I think you will agree that this is a true, blue Christmas miracle, as well as a good משׁ-משׁ


--

сна и чая: sleep and tea

 бабушки

два брата спят в автомобиле,
две сестры танцуют в клубе
Я одинокий бабушки
кто ждет
У самовара ...
Вы хотите чаю?
--
two brother asleep in an auto,
two sisters dancing at a club;
I am a solitary granny
by the samovar...
would you like some tea?

два брата

--

The Mystery Of Poetry: Abortion And Christmas 2008

 

Saharan Cypress at Tassili N'Ajjer

Sometimes poems are mysterious, but become domesticated as time wears on, as if a wild lion raised in the belt of civilization becomes as docile as a fat tabby cat.
But sometimes they remain mysterious and wild, running like wild children who are lost from their mothers - or who are cast out from their villages - and are raised by a troop of ghazelles in the Tassili n'Ajjer desert in Algeria; awesome youth,  remote, untutored and unkempt, yet bearing all the lineaments of humanity - and overwhelming in their beauty.
Not that I know anything about such existences. I was born into wealth and royalty.

This poem below still haunts me years on.
There is a line: 

Then from a tangled thicket
I grasped a ring of lapis lazuli,
the joint of 2 bones, and pupil
of the brilliant eye, and was born...

It still makes me faint-headed; it is as if God let me perform the miracle of life, and from nothing came wonderful being...and - when I reflect - I realize that is true, and I did have a child: I am a father.
Yet sometimes the creation and nurture of life strikes us as so mundane and pedestrian; we even give up the lives we consider superfluous; sometimes we think "father" or "mother" a really poor job description, and we pass on it for something better.

I never speak of abortion. Of course, there are many things I do not speak of.

The past and our grandsires do stand behind us, pushing us, and other beings-yet-to-be stand in front of us in our futures, pulling us, and that we are in the eye of a Present Immediate of a vastly baroque and byzantine creation... yet often - so often! - we stand squandering the magic, throwing away the baraka...
Such is life in the present. I am not a judge, for I am not learned nor am I saintly.

To grasp a ring and 2 bones, and thus to be the focus of the greatest mystery...life!
To be born!
Let me live, and let me be born to the ferocious mothers of the desert, coming to the rivulet to drink in the wasteland where an oasis is a singular olive tree. Let me live, and let the wilderness teach me, and let me learn nobility and honor East of your Eden.
Let me live with troops and pods and packs, then, if cities are not to be my home. Let me run naked, if I am not to be swaddled in mankind's cloth.
If your societies have degraded life, send me to the badlands, where every force alive strives to increase life and well-being in the face of great odds!

Let me crown the earth. Let me be happy to have been born, and let the earth be happy to have borne me.

"You see these bananas. May your life have no bruises either."
Mother Of George

CHRISTMAS 2008

The Trees

I used to be a tree,
and grew upon a hill;
I used to be arboreal
and deep roots immobile
I thought imprisoned me.
Then from a tangled thicket
I grasped a ring of lapis lazuli,
the joint of 2 bones, and pupil
of the brilliant eye, and was born
my parents most loved fruit
in a storm of heat at
the rising of the Pleiades.
Now...O, now, I see...
and I shall be
soon again a tree,
maenad queen of windswept hills;
pastor triumphant of animals
that flock the virginal
nativity's flash of light!

--

reworked from 2008

Syria? Remember Libya...

When NATO First in Libya Struck



When NATO first in Libya struck,
I felt my soul’s exuberance -
saw the Colonel’s intransigence!
The rebels in their pickup truck
watching oil flames rise to the sky,
the world drank champagne in Dubai!

The price of gasoline will rise
and so will price of wheat and bread;
news flash mixed with video games,
while Bouazizi greets the flames,
with Fatimid speed now widely spread
before the Almoravid eyes!

Now history no longer shocks,
seen from the world’s tallest building:
a mere tempest in an X-Box!
Immune in Andalusia,
await Isabella’s wedding!
Street vendor, martyr, gloria!

Does anyone recall the day
when the Khaleef Omar would spend -
full half the world beneath his sway! –
with needle, thread, his own shirts mend?
beyond the pyre of dogma’s fires
the sun sets not, but now expires!

What shall we do upon that day
when we find out, to our dismay,
that furrows dug no longer fruit,
and weapons aimed no longer shoot?
how that extinction will we tend
if God’s blessing no longer wend?

----------

notes:

My consternation watching violence. Everything is on cable TV and seems unreal from my perspective of my youth.


The Rhyme scheme constantly changes.

Bouazizi – Muhammad Bouazizi, the street vendor in Tunisia whose self-immolation started the Middle East uprisings.

Fatimid – a dynasty originally in Egypt and an offspring established the dynasty in Spain. The speed is the speed of a blessing or good luck, because the Fatimids in Spain endured and those in Egypt did not.

Almoravid - a old North African dynasty.

Andalusia - the final Muslim kingdom in Spain at the late 15th century.

Isabella’s wedding – to Ferdinand. She was Columbus patron. The royal couple defeated the last Muslim kingdom in Spain and also expelled the Jews from Spain.

khaleef - standing for “khaleefa”, which means “successor”. Usually spelled “caliph”. ‘Umar or Omar was a khaleefa of strict probity and displayed no ostentation nor love of money or power. He also mended his own garments.

world’s tallest building – Burj Khaleefa in Dubai. Tower of Babylon type thing. Dubai is used as an emblem of pointless and soulless wealth.

wend – “expected”; past participle of “ween”, to expect. Used by Chaucer and now considered archaic.

Syria: A Poem From The Past

Written for my daughter's wedding in 2010.

The Story of the Calligraph Invite



Received a response today;

they will attend the wedding,

and the reception,

and the party thereafter.

It says they and their family accept

she said.



Their family?

Who? A son, a daughter?

Immediate or extended family?

he asked.



They shook their heads

and stood looking at the coloured

inks of the calligraph invite;

the envelope ripped open, and it

a sad courier dangling from a hand,

it prayed: O, please do not kill

this poor messenger, O parents good!

Parents of the bride! Maybe God grant

her joyful increase!

Place me with my brothers

and sisters in the place of honor!



Perhaps that is how it's done

in Syria, she said. We shall make do.

But how, he said, but how to afford...

gently she touched his lips with

her finger tip, the key of silence

that locks the door of wrath.

It is all for the best.

We are between the hands of Allah,

who blesses man and woman,

and wants this blessing

to be shared by more.



Syrians, he thought.

No Saudi prince am I.

He paused a while.

But I am mubarak...blessed...

by this event much more than I

can bless...or sate with food and drink.

Let them come! he said,

smiling, and took the calligraph invite

and placed it with RSVPs

next to his wife's computer.

--

Science of Poetry: Trembling on the Edge of Meaning

 Taquamenon Falls, Michigan

 This week I wrote a poem about stuff, one stuff of which was Taquamenon Falls, and I finished with:
 
... every drop of falling water
is canonized ecology haunting to
our daedal palimpsest nostalgia!

and it was a bit of a tussle to write what I wanted to say.

"canonized" has hues of holiness,
"haunting" intimates spirit movement,
"daedal" is for intricate workmanship,
"palimpsest" means rewritten, reused, written over, and reeks of novelty over antiquity,
"nostalgia" literally mean homecoming + pain;

and the idea of a holy quest of return to well-constructed homes, which we miss greatly, and where we shall start things over anew.
I don't say this straight forward, but I do not try to obscure. Rather, I try to mix the meanings together and make a new whole which will carry the meaning in a new way.

I am not saying I succeeded in this, and that the poem is a great poem, but I did experience quite a feeling of sudden clarity. It was exactly the same feeling I get when I am reading or speaking a new language, and suddenly the sounds and movements of the speech muscles come together in a feeling of understanding that is deep and profound and seems to be like jumping into the world with a totally new seeing and breathing and smelling and touching.

I think that poetry is this trembling on the edge of meaning.
Meaning is in motion and it reminds me of Brownian motion, random flickering, until a quick collapse into a shining seeing when one says "aha!"
As in the poem for Mothers' Day day, there was "... so much all-utterly song" which is a English language novelty that requires not a piecemeal pecking at, but a meditative embrace that gathers in one all the meaning, feelings, and emotions of the expression.

The difference between Shelley and a limerick lay in the one is filled with potential to deeply understand reality and the other is rather straight forward and has little potential beyond what is immediate and obvious.

I think that if the phenomenon were to be studied in the lab, the areas of the brain engaged in reading good poetry would be the same as those used by learners of a new language, who are finding new things everywhere - like children just learning - and who have not yet fallen into the rut of everyday usage and the mundane chatter of media.

--

Why I Write Poetry

I just finished my 6th year of writing a poem each week in my poetry blog ( http://peace-weaving.blogspot.com/ ).
Sometimes I wonder why I do it, since not very many people read poetry. I am glad that there are many who like it, but sometimes we always want more people to share our high opinions of ourselves.

Alas!

However, I do write poetry for myself. I write in this blog, also, for myself. I write to clarify my consciousness. There are a great many things we are aware of as intelligent beings, and many are very complex. I cannot deal with the complexity unless I try to set it out in writing: the bends and folds and complexes of love and hate, war and peace, hunger and satiety...

Give it word, give it image, icon, symbol, song!

--

Light

Aunt Wilma's vase is not Lalique;
Phoenix Glass of glowing salt that's kasher,
brimming with the sweet of challah,
naked table putting on the dress of shabbas:
naked as in Solomon's Song,
young hearts like
gazelles of mankind
run like the dickens
to greet sundown.

--
note
for some reason, something glowing reminds me of molten salt.

Waiting For Odysseus

Waiting For Odysseus

Odysseus was the geek of his times. The really big warriors were the amoks, like Ajax and Achilles, who literally were possessed by the gods and spirits when in the frenzy of battle.

Odysseus was a warrior, but he was also a clever person... as Zorba said, like a "grocer" who "weighs everything." 

You never saw anyone meticulously weigh things in a tender balance while they were in a blood-lust frenzy.

--

How Does A Poem?

Poetry is the Large Hadron Collider of Intelligible Reality.

--

Soothe The Anger

The events of the last few days made us all frightened and angry. This poem from 2009 reminds me of a calming influence and feeling of charity we need and search for.

People have been interviewed, and they moan our best days are behind us.
We are angry and we are pained, but we have the future, and the future is what we make it.
I always think of Mary, or Miriam, when I read this, guardian against fear and anger.

Mothers' Day 2009


Mothers teach us how to pray before we
go to bed, kneeling beside white sheets
and using the currency of our innocence
to try to set the world upright again,
and save us all from atom bombs
and things that go bump
in the night.

Mothers teach us how to dress before we
go outside - we who want to naked run
and throw our clothes in a thoughtless pile -
she buttons up the surrounding collars;
and orders the chattering teeth
of shameless zippers
to subdue!

Mothers bake yet are not bakers; mothers
heal yet are not doctors; they open eyes
to art, many never having held a brush;
design pillow forts, yet aren't architects.
the grace of God they
dispense, yet are
not priests.

Mothers are an ancient holy order,
taken vows of silence, crying why? but
never speaking, door keepers of God's grace
that beats upon our shut monastery door:
she bids enter! the divine
visitor to wash
and eat!

Mothers sit shiva upon their dreams and
never let us know the shipwreck of desires
they had for the princes and princesses
of their fruitful bodies, for mothers yet
may resurrect the hopes and dreams
of mankind grown old:
young harts leaping!
--

notes:
young harts leaping:
from the Song of Solomon.



At the time, no one commented on this poem. I think it is rather good, because my wife says it is, and she is a "tough house" as they say in the comedy clubs.

--

Poetry Blogs

I like art blogs. Even the ones with the worst taste in anything have an incredible vibration of life...
except poetry blogs. They are sort of drab. Drabulous... a new word made from drab and crapulous.

Poetry blogs are drabulous.

Give me a poetry blog with a splash of Watson and the Shark, eh, Mate!

J.S. Copley's Watson And The Shark

Not a drabulous pixel anywhere.

--